Managing the journey from start-up to IPO and beyond - with Henry Schuck, Founder and CEO ZoomInfo

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show. welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Henry Schuck, the founder and CEO of ZoomInfo. We'll be covering three primary topic areas with Henry today. First, the journey from founding discover Org to the ZoomInfo IPO and beyond. Discussion about data-driven processes and decisions, how they were used at ZoomInfo to achieve the success they have. And second, the lessons learned from leading a public company during the industry correction, or as my friends at Bessemer say, the SaaS occur over the last six to seven quarters. Henry, let's take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming my guest here in the Metrics and Measure Up podcast.

**Henry Schuck** (1:21)
Great, Ray, thank you for having me. My name is Henry Schuck. I'm the founder and CEO of ZoomInfo. I founded ZoomInfo 17 years ago in my law school dorm when I was 23 years old. The idea then and still today is how do you provide sales and marketing professionals with the most up-to-date data about who their prospects are, who their customers are, who the buyers at those companies and prospects are, and whether they're in market for your products and services right now. How do we deliver that in the easiest way so that you can take a signal and then activate it throughout your sales team so that you know what your total addressable market looks like, so that you have accurate data at your fingertips in your CRM system and your marketing automation systems. With that really accurate data foundation, you can be incredibly efficient in the way that you go to market. You can resource more properly, and you can run a really great go-to-market organization. We've been focused on data and the delivery of that data and the software and workflow tools around that data since 2007

**Ray Rike** (2:32)
Well, I would be very surprised since our audience is primarily all B2B SaaS executives that our 10,000 plus monthly listeners don't know ZoomInfo. But they may not know the full history since that dorm room at the Ohio State University, if I'm not mistaken, correct, Henry?

**Henry Schuck** (2:48)
Right, you're a partial to them, I think, Ray.

**Ray Rike** (2:51)
I am. That's where I spent four years, or maybe my parents would say five years of undergrad experience. But I'd love for you to share a little bit more about that journey from that founding to the IPO, at least on a summary level, because I don't think most companies know how you grew and some of the strategies that you invoked.

**Henry Schuck** (3:10)
Sure. So we bootstrapped the business, and so when we started the company in 2007, and we started a company in Columbus, Ohio, with two founders who had never done it before, and this was 2007, and so the economy was not flush with VC capital or private equity capital the way it is today or the way it's been over the last decade. And so there wasn't really much of an option other than to self-fund and bootstrap the business. So I put $25,000 on my credit card, my co-founder put $25,000 on his credit card, and we started the business. And we grew it without any outside financing, outside of that $50,000 that we self-funded, up to $30 million of run rate revenue. And then that was when we brought in our first outside capital, a company called TA Associates. That gave us the opportunity to invest more in the business, do a couple of acquisitions and really focus on how do you grow the company over the next, you know, private equity firms tend to hold the business for three to five years. And so our focus was, hey, how do we grow the business as aggressively as possible while also maintaining profitability over the next three to five years so that the private equity firm could transact again? We did an incredible job of that, did an acquisition of a company in our space named Rain King in 2017, brought those two companies together. That was a really successful acquisition. And then our private equity owner said, hey, you guys are pretty good at this acquisition thing, why don't you go and do another one? And so we acquired ZoomInfo in February of 2019 The company that I had founded was actually called discover Org. And so we changed the name from discover Org to ZoomInfo in 2019 when we made that acquisition, put the two companies together again, now we had a much broader data asset. discover Org was focused on IT decision makers. And so our customers were tech companies, just 100% of our customers were tech companies who sold into IT decision makers. And what ZoomInfo gave us the ability to do, ZoomInfo was focused on, we had a much broader data set. And so we said, hey, if we could bring a much broader data set to our quality and research focus, together with our quality and research focus, I bet we can build a much bigger company here. And so we went from being able to service just a small part of the market to being able to service any company that sold to another business. When we made that acquisition in 2019, we were about a $270 million revenue business. Today, we're about $1.3 billion in revenue. We still operate profitably. And so we're doing that with 40% operating margins. We have a team of about 3,500 employees now across the globe, and we work with about 35,000 customers. Everything from the Fortune 100 to a pallet manufacturer in Tuscaloosa and everything in between.